Posts tagged with “web development”
I’ve updated whyisrossbrown.com with some direct linking/history functionality. Matt forked my repo and rejiggered the script to use sammy.js for back button functionality.
This means I can link directly to my Signal Chains project which loads that tape immediately. It’s one of the coolest things you’ll see all day.
Why is Ross Brown?
Matt suggested a while ago that, since I own ‘rossisbrown.com’, I buy the domain ‘whyisrossbrown.com’ as well. After about three minutes of laughing, I did.
I am now using it to point to a portfolio (or what I’m calling a Portfolio Machine) of both my web and music/audio work. Looking at it makes me think of a wood and plastic iPad. I built and designed the thing, with occasional input from Matt.
The page is javascript-heavy. The portfolio items, shown as VHS tapes on a shelf, are made up of markup generated by underscore.js, meaning I only have to update a nicely formatted javascript file to add new portfolio items. It also means search engines won’t crawl it, so there’s a trade-off. It’s a work in progress, but I think it’s a lot of fun. The next version will include direct portfolio item urls and back button functionality, provided by Sammy and Matt’s brain.
It’s open sourced on Github with very little documentation, so fork it and hack away at your own.
Signal Chains (beta)
Matt and I have been working on Signal Chains for a few months, and are finally somewhat ready for the public to see it. I’m going to create a crisis here to make what we did seem so much cooler:
The Problem: Audio gear is expensive. Few brick and mortar stores carry expensive audio gear and will let you get your grubby little hands all over it before purchasing. Conversely, when people post audio samples online, you’re not always sure what is involved. Is it really that mic that sounds that way? Or is the preamp they’re using coloring the sound?
The Solution: Signal Chains is essentially a way for audio engineers (or those who call themselves audio engineers) to share their signal flows through audio samples, documenting each piece and process involved. It does this by providing a somewhat standardized method of doing so.
10 Beautiful Sites Using Different CMSes
I’ve dreamed of the day I would appear in a top ten list.
Apparently that dream has been made a reality by Melissa Ward at melly.me in her collection of fancy looking designs that sit on top of CMSes. Mine is one of the two Chyrp sites on the list. Thanks Melissa, and the theme is open source.
To everyone else, feel free to put me on any top ten lists you feel like.
I just rolled out some “enhancements” to the theme of this site. I felt like the sidebar was getting crowded, so I added some navigation to the top of the page and eliminated some messiness.
“Links”, “About”, and “Contact” actually load in the content of their respective pages. Hopefully this makes my website look less pathetic due to the small amount of content.
“Music” and “Tags” show content from the sidebar, which is hidden if JavaScript is turned on. It all degrades pretty nicely.
The biggest challenge was achieve appropriate behavior of the resizing and hiding of header content; most notably when loading one set of information into the header without closing the box first. It’s all handled in the nav.js file using jQuery. I know there are quite a few redundancies in there, so if you’ve got an idea on a better way to achieve these results, fork the Master Plumber Chyrp theme which is entirely available on GitHub. Either way, I’m going to sit back and enjoy the fruits of my labor by continuously clicking menu items.
I also recreated the sidebar background with a tighter wire grid look. The old one’s sloppiness had been bugging me for a while. The background is a recycled use of this image: 
which I created for another project.
I hope it’s all pleasing to your eyes. Mine are tired of looking at it.